I am working on ridding myself of the part of my mind that has been so poisoned by "hustle-culture" and all that nonsense that leads to me being ashamed of those creative or artistic endeavors that do not end up earning any money (or have no potential for it).
Stopped me from writing for years. Kept me from indulging in story telling and even reading.
Dear #fediverse what are your strategies for dealing with such a horrid mindset?
Threads: I'm in a wrong party and don't know what to say. I feel awkward, everyone is so happy with their gym selfies. Everyone asking endless questions and asking things from the algorithm. Lots of people use it like Instagram, every post is a selfie with a meaningless caption. Some are copy-pasting the same sentence over and over again for each line. Endless quote-post memes... What the fuck is this shit I don't even...
Bluesky: A Twitter clone, but still very barebones. Notifications are still not working, there are no hashtags and I don't find any relevant content to me in any of the feeds. It's mostly Facebook-like what's up in life, furry scene and AI photos. No news, no tech/web scene, no nothing. Not to mention it's still invite-only and won't support ActivityPub (yeah I know the reasoning behind that but for me it's mostly bullshit, I look forward to trying bridgy fed).
Mastodon and the Fediverse: Here I'm at home on my own server. Most content, most features. A community is friendly but has also lots of nitpicking, some angry dudes. Still the most safest, most healthy and most customized, but somehow the most hated network elsewhere. "Too techie", they say. "Too difficult", they say. "No algorithm", they say.
Nostr: Kinda promising, but way too obscure, strange and even techier than Mastodon. Too much crypto shit.
Well, that's that. Sometimes I feel like Internet is ruined. But I believe in the open social web movement and I want to see this grow.
In no other place I can write a status update as freely as this, as long as this or with a low bar as this. I LIKE this 100%. The same can't be said in those other places I'm experimenting with out of curiosity. There I'm the weird kid. Here I feel like myself.
I'd argue that we're stuck cause we're buying into their framing. decentralized social media is a technology, not a corporate platform. email is the best comparison. if you could only email with other Gmail accounts but Gmail was huge with lots of nice features, many would be happy with that. Same with Outlook. But when we explain it obviously shouldn't work that way, they'd have no argument. We're clunky like email was at first, but we'll obviously get better with more user adoption.
What I personally want more than a good test suite in #ActivityPub, and possibly a lower bar, is a good reference implementation.
Specifically, I'd want something that:
Implements all nontrivial requirements of the spec.
Implements a significant percentage of the data vocabulary
Can handle a nontrivial amount of traffic. It doesn't need to be optimized for it, but it can't fall over in a stiff breeze—analysis should be comparable to analysis of a prod system, just at smaller scale
I think in many ways a test suite would be more generally useful, but part of what I personally find challenging is simply determining what it even means to "handle a response."
A reference implementation would solve this.
I know of a few efforts in this regard, but most of them seem to have an iron triangle around the three criteria above:
One or two of the three only. Never all three together.
So far I have developed some heuristics when looking at implementations here.
I'm glad #projectgutenberg made their #fediverse debut in 2023. Having their library announcements/recommendations in my feed is just what I needed especially for 2024.
Great literary suggestions (and books!) that provide an oasis and outlet from the digital noise of today. I would dare say that curling up with a good book is one of life's most satisfying and enjoyable experiences!
@ernest
I've noticed this week that I'm currently seeing no visual indication that the boost button is active. No underline, color, or anything.
It seems that a now-broken userstyle I'm using expects there to be an "active" class applied to the element, but it isn't anymore. Is that intentional?
Figured I should point this out to you in case you don't know already.
@Pamasich@ernest Can confirm that this is an issue. I brought attention to it a short while back, and there are also some bugs with the visuals for vote buttons not consistently working as they should.
I may be the only one but for #fediverse apps I prefer a PWA over a native app. Small teams building apps that don't need direct access to hardware benefit from putting all their energy and resources into one (1) platform.
The sheer number of #Zuckerberg (and others) #quislings in the #Fediverse is going to kill it. Inside of five years #independent, #distributed#SocialMedia will be dead for all practical purposes, and the people holding the daggers covered in its blood will be those who were inside it.
Gestern lief eine Aufstellung der "historischen" Schritte, die zum Entstehen des Fediverse geführt haben, durch meine Timeline. Lest selbst, wie es sich in den letzten 15 Jahren entwickelt hat.
@BrauchC@gnulinux@quincy@crossgolf_rebel Es gibt leider nur noch weniger als eine Hand voll GNU Social Server, auf denen mensch sich anmelden kann. Da bliebe nur noch, selber hosten. War lange auf LoadAverage. Quitter war nur so ein kurzer Hype, weil das eine Twitter-ähnliche Oberfläche hatte. Hypes sind Scheiße, sieht mensch jetzt wieder. Es ist egal, was fürs Netzwerke das sind, ob sie was taugen oder nicht. Mastodon, Bluesky, meta und dann die Kindernetzwerke... Mit 70 darf ich das sagen!
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
@thenexusofprivacy@fediverse@fediversenews Simply blocking Threads won't actually accomplish anything, except leave people stuck on Threads. If we want to actually help people, we need to take active actions beyond boycotts. We need to bleed users off of Threads, and we cannot do that if we block them outright.
404's everywhere, "we're working on it" signs everywhere else.
Like sure, not being able to find my response in the pile of thread sounds like Linux problems, but how is this not loading faster and better than reddit?
So, how is #ActivityPub implementation in #GitLab going? Steadily, if a bit slowly!
In the last four months, we've been working on implementing the first ActivityPub actor, the one allowing to subscribe to projects releases. The ActivityPub part is already written, but there will still be a couple month before it's fully merged. Turns out that the most time consuming part is code review : there is no dedicated team to this (but there is a dedicated developer assisting me, thanks Patrick!), so people reviewing code discover ActivityPub at the time they have to review it (and, by the way, it's incredible how they get out of their way to help a contributor on such a complex subject, they rock). For that reason, we have to make smaller than usual merge requests, splitting the feature as much as possible, and then some again, to make it as easy to understand as possible. And even then it usually takes about a month to get one chunk merged.
